Last week 3jam and Virgin Mobile announced their partnership. That’s really amazing news! Virgin Mobile is promoting that deal heavily, e.g. on their homepage and via messages to subscribers.
What is 3jam?
In 2005 Andy Jagoe and Enlai Chu started developing a new way of text messaging communication. Let’s name it SMS 2.0. It improves the basic text messaging by allowing friends and family to stay connected with group communication. The 3jam service is free, only SMS charges may apply. But the cool thing is that each text message you send or receive through 3jam is counted as 1 standard text message, even when your message may be received by multiple recipients in the 3jam conversation.
How does the 3jam service via Virgin Mobile works?
The Virgin Mobile customers have first to sign up on the menu of Virgin Mobile’s WAP deck or at 3jam.com/virgin.Then they can start sending SMS to any number of friends simultaneously. The receipients of the SMS can reply to all at once.
How big is the market for SMS?
For this year Informa analysts suggest the value of global SMS traffic at 60 Billion USD ; Gartner forcasts 1.8 Trillion USD by 2010 .
In the US we already talked to some carriers and most of them are pretty interested in partnerships with service developers, since they can help them to attract more customers and also increase their ARPU.
Currently, 3jam is building a global service for transiting, billing and clearing multi-party SMS messages. They are also working on some new features. Rocco already met the 3jam Andy and Enlai. Way to go 3jam!
Sources: us.blognation.com 3jam.com virginmobile.com